Miss Bourne’s first book starts in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1932. She is 24, her father is Secretary for Defence and she has a comfortable and well-connected lifestyle, having been to a finishing school in England and done the London social scene. She has a degree from Oxford and a well-paid job as a journalist, but she is listless and “can no longer pretend to be clever, social, and worldly.” For several years she has been drawn to the sea, and she decides impulsively to go east to “find out what those three poses have nearly suffocated in me.”
Amazingly, her mother, Mamma, goes with her, agreeing to suspend the normal maternal and filial rules, and to go their separate way if one or other so desires at any time.
Their first stage, a month on board the Norwegian Wilhelmsen Line’s cargo/passenger ship Thermopylae, took them to Australia early in 1933. Over the next ten months they sojourned in Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, Raratonga, Tahiti, and New Zealand, travelling in a variety of vessels and staying in interesting out of the way places, but always close to the sea. In April, the following year, Mamma returned home from Sydney, and Pamela finally arrived at her spiritual and physical destination, the four-masted windjammer Herzogin Cecilie. The ship was berthed at Wallaroo in South Australia, laden with grain and about to sail to Falmouth for Orders, with Pamela as a working passenger.
Whereas the journey until now had been somewhat haphazard, Pamela’s desire to serve on one of the few remaining commercial sailing ships had been an underlying objective of the previous year. Amazingly, on Thermopylae she had persuaded the First Mate to let her spend the days working with the crew on such grim tasks as chipping rust and painting. She and the Bosun had warmed to each other, he called her Nils, and they spent long hours talking about life at sea and beyond. At night she returned to the cabin she shared with Mamma. At later stages in their journey she had wistfully noted another sailing ship, the Magdalen Viggen, she had talked at length with the sea-faring wife of the captain of another windjammer, and she had made efforts on another vessel to learn navigation. Thus, by October, 1933, she had been granted passage in principle as a working passenger on the Herzogin Cecilie.
The last fifty pages of the book describe her experience aboard the ship, with which she truly fell in love, on their four-month voyage to Belfast. A number of books have been written by men about similar voyages but this is a uniquely feminine account, the beginning in fact of a romantic tragedy which she recorded twenty years later in her second book, The Duchess.